4basebio enters development deal with T-cell therapy firm Leucid
By Josh White
Date: Tuesday 23 Nov 2021
(Sharecast News) - Life sciences company 4basebio announced a joint development agreement between its wholly owned-subsidiary 4basebio Discovery and Leucid Bio on Tuesday, which it said was pioneering "next-generation" chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapies for hard-to-treat cancers.
The AIM-traded firm described CAR-T therapy as an ex-vivo cell therapy which involved genetically reprogramming a patient's T-cells to recognise and destroy cancer cells.
While current practice relied on integrating viral vectors to deliver genetic payloads to generate the CAR T-cells, non-viral based approaches such as MaxCyte's electroporation technology were gaining popularity given their scalability, improved safety profile and flexibility in delivering payloads aimed at creating allogeneic, "off-the-shelf" CAR T-cells.
Under the agreement, the companies would evaluate the use of 4basebio's 'Hermes' non-viral nanoparticle and synthetic 'hpDNA' technology for the enhanced delivery of genetic payloads to generate CART-cells.
The company said the successful outcome of the project would "pave the way" for the development of a novel, high-performance and more cost-effective cell engineering method for CAR-T products.
Leucid Bio recently closed an £11.5m series A financing round to progress its development of CAR-T therapies.
The company's 'pCAR' technology gave properties to cells, enabling them to consistently outperform previous generations of CAR-T therapies in preclinical studies.
"We are very excited to be working with Leucid Bio, a pioneer in next-generation CAR-T therapies, in developing a novel cell engineering approach for CAR-T products," said Heikki Lanckriet, 4basebio's chief executive and chief scientific officer.
At 1301 GMT, shares in 4basebio were up 0.01% at 720.05p.
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